(C) South Dakota Searchlight This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Closed public records obscure reasons for crime trends in South Dakota • South Dakota Searchlight [1] ['John Hult', 'More From Author', 'March'] Date: 2024-03-15 Whither the stolen vehicle? That’s the question I’m left with after the biannual crime stats breakdown at the Sioux Falls Law Enforcement Center this week. The 2023 crime stats presented Tuesday ran the gamut. Big picture, crime is down from last year; up from 10 years ago. Up like the population. It’s just how things are in my town: A year passes, and a Chamberlain’s worth of people who didn’t live here before suddenly do. Some of them commit crimes. Crime growth is roughly commensurate with population growth. At least until you get to stolen vehicles. By that statistic, Sioux Falls straight stinks. Stolen vehicle reports are up 363% since 2014, from just over 346 to more than 1,602 in 2023. The news will periodically tell us why. The telling goes like so: “Too many people leave their keys in their vehicles. Cars with keys in them are cars that get stolen.” True! But also, true in 2014. Some people move to Sioux Falls from small towns where everyone leaves the keys in the truck. Some have lived in the “big” city long enough to remember it being small enough to get away with that. It’s a habit best left behind when you move to the shopping town, or when that town starts to swallow cornfields like cotton candy and swell into the exurbs. City officials sang the “watch your keys” refrain again on Tuesday. Eighty percent of stolen vehicles were unlocked with the keys inside, Sioux Falls Police Chief Jon Thum said. I wanted to know how Sioux Falls could go from normal to lunacy in less than 10 years for no reason but one that’s been around as long as cars have. Thum’s take? The fobs are at fault. Specifically the key fobs that, when in proximity, give a vehicle permission to unlock its doors and start its engine with the push of a button. A lot of newer vehicles have those now, and there are more fobs out there than there were in 2014. Sunshine Week Launched in 2005 by the American Society of News Editors, Sunshine Week aims to promote open government and shine light into the dark recesses of government secrecy. Learn more at SunshineWeek.org. Some people leave key fobs in their cars for convenience. Their regular keys get carried to their front door, where it’s still necessary to pull them out and operate them manually to get inside. A fob in a cup holder is a short half step from an open door and a sign that reads “steal this Prius.” Under the fob theory, vehicle theft is easier because fobs. Word gets around about that, inviting still more vehicle theft. They don’t go to chop shops, Thum insisted. People drive them, look for valuables in them, maybe use them to drive through the front door of a business they’d like to burglarize, then leave them behind. “The primary market for these cars is committing other crimes,” the chief said. But the most interesting thing he said wasn’t about stolen vehicles. At least not to me. Instead, it was a wry, throwaway quip, the kind of thing someone says in an interview when they know they’ve successfully navigated a question and are moving on. “We’ll have to test that theory. Maybe a college will pick that up. Probably not.” I’m sure at least a few collegiate researchers would love to. I’d love to. But I can’t. Police reports are not open records in South Dakota. The written officer narratives any researcher would need to gather information on, say, key fobs in cup holders, are inaccessible to the public. It doesn’t have to be that way. In most states, it’s not. The Sioux City Police Department in Iowa has a web portal for police reports. I asked for a stolen vehicle report filed at 4:30 a.m. Actual police report requests can take about two weeks to review and send, but the SCPD has an officer who can give summaries. The victim was warming up their vehicle; someone drove off with it. That’s useful, but not as useful as the full report. Police reports are basic building blocks of crime reporting or crime research. They’re not an endpoint. A police report is often hearsay, after all. Unless officers see a crime themselves, they’re recording someone else’s story. In Sioux Falls, there’s another layer of hearsay. Every day, police spokesman Sam Clemens appears on a livestream and reads parts of police reports to the media. They ask questions, he looks at the report and answers. Or he doesn’t. Ask about the relationship between a perpetrator and their victim, and he might say something like “we don’t talk about victims.” Want to know why the suspect showed up at the victim’s door with a hatchet? Sam will say just enough about what the responding officer wrote to stay on the right side of the department’s legal team. I’ve known Sam a long time and trust him as well as I would any public information officer, but he’s as much a gatekeeper as a public servant. It’s unavoidable in a state that hides so much law enforcement activity from its public. Sam doesn’t write the laws. Neither does Chief Thum. Complaints like mine on weeks like this – Sunshine Week, observed by news organizations to promote open government – are sometimes viewed by people who do write laws as little more than the twittering of uppity whiners who wish their jobs were easier. We’re just after salacious details to sell ads and get clicks, right? Even if you believe that, Thum’s joke about college researchers digging into his vehicle theft theory doubles as a window into the value of government transparency. There are questions police are typically too busy policing to explore themselves. But the reasons behind crime trends are often in their records. Open records and open data open doors. They open up discussions. They close open questions and reopen closed ones. They make it possible to learn things about our communities we can otherwise only guess about. Things like “whither the stolen vehicle?” for starters. [END] --- [1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/03/15/closed-public-records-obscure-reasons-for-crime-trends-in-south-dakota/ Published and (C) by South Dakota Searchlight Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/sdsearchlight/